Sermon Illustrations on meditation



Background

Biblical Meditation

Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna (in On the Book of Psalms) points out that the mediation mentioned in Psalm 1 (The man who “meditates on [God’s] law day and night”) is “not engaged in meditation and contemplation, such as required in some mystical systems and traditions.” (38) Instead, the kind of individual study in question is, “reading aloud, rote learning, and constant oral repetition.” (38) Silent reading was uncommon in the ancient world and even the Hebrew word for “to read” also means “to proclaim.” This method of study was common between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and even China. Sarna adds,

Study of the sacred text—torah—was not just an intellectual pursuit or matter of professional training, but a spiritual and moral discipline. It was the authoritative guide to right behavior. Constant repetition and review “day and night,” functioned to incorporate its values within the self so that they became a part of one’s own being, consciously and subconsciously guiding one’s actions. (39)

Sarna concludes that this is why study of Torah was so important—a sacred duty—rather than an “elitist enterprise.” Studying aloud was not only intellectual, but an act of worship.

William Rowley

Which God Do You Believe In?

Does it matter which God-concept we hold to? Recent brain research by Dr. Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania has documented that all forms of contemplative meditation were associated with positive brain changes—but the greatest improvements occurred when participants meditated specifically on a God of love.

Such meditation was associated with growth in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain right behind our forehead where we reason, make judgments and experience Godlike love) and subsequent increased capacity for empathy, sympathy, compassion and altruism.

But here’s the most astonishing part. Not only does other-centered love increase when we worship a God of love, but sharp thinking and memory improve as well. In other words, worshiping a God of love actually stimulates the brain to heal and grow.

Withdrawing to a Lonely Place Apart

In the midst of an exceedingly busy ministry Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to “a lonely place apart” (Matt. 14:13; see also Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 6:12, Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31, Luke 5:16, Matt. 17:1-9, and Matt. 26:36-46). He did this not just to be away from people, but so he could be with God. What did Jesus do time after time in those deserted hills? He sought out his heavenly Father; he listened to him, he communed with him. And he beckons us to do the same.

Christian meditation, very simply, is the ability to hear God’s voice and obey his word. … The truth of the matter is that the great God of the universe, the Creator of all things desires our fellowship.

Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1998, pp.16-17).

Stories

Withdrawing to a Lonely Place Apart

In the midst of an exceedingly busy ministry Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to “a lonely place apart” (Matt. 14:13; see also Matt. 4:1-11, Luke 6:12, Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31, Luke 5:16, Matt. 17:1-9, and Matt. 26:36-46). He did this not just to be away from people, but so he could be with God. What did Jesus do time after time in those deserted hills? He sought out his heavenly Father; he listened to him, he communed with him. And he beckons us to do the same.

Christian meditation, very simply, is the ability to hear God’s voice and obey his word. … The truth of the matter is that the great God of the universe, the Creator of all things desires our fellowship.

Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1998, pp.16-17).

Trusting In God’s Word & Providence

In 1933, as Hitler’s Nazi party rose to power in Germany, the Jewish artist Marc Chagall painted Solitude. In the foreground, a seated man sits wrapped in a tallit, or prayer shawl. His right hand supports his head in an attitude of contemplation, and his left arm embraces a large Torah scroll. At his side, a heifer seems to be playing a violin. In the background the city of Vitebsk—where Chagall was born and raised—is shrouded in darkness and watched over by an angel.

At the time he painted this, Chagall was working “obsessively” on a commission to illustrate the Old Testament while also keenly aware of the looming clouds of Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the Nazis’ first examples of “degenerate” Jewish art was a painting by Chagall. In the midst of these unsettling political developments, Chagall drew on the Jewish tradition of deep, loving attention to the Scripture.

The violin-playing cow is an image of the imaginative, artistic meditation on the divine Word being practiced by the man cradling the Torah scroll. Why a cow? Because the Hebrew word hagah, like the Latinate English word ruminate, means both “to meditate” and also “to chew the cud.” David Jeffrey links Chagall’s painting to this trope, explaining that “by analogy with the peaceable heifer, a spiritually flourishing person is said to be one who meditates on the Word of God, day and night.”

One of the iconic Old Testament passages that relies on this wordplay is Psalm 1, where the blessed man “delight[s] in the law of the LORD, / and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps 1:2). The result of this meditation is not just some kind of personal enrichment: the psalmist compares the person who ruminates on God’s Word to a tree “planted by streams of water / that yields its fruit in its season, / and its leaf does not wither” (Ps 1:3).

The result of scriptural rumination is fruit that blesses one’s place and community. The rooted life of the blessed man contrasts with “the wicked [who] . . . / are like the chaff that the wind drives away” (Ps 1:4). These chafflike fools are blown about by the latest fads and trends; in this way, they are like those with macadamized minds. A Christian image for healthy attention, then, might be this rooted tree—or a violin-playing heifer.

In Chagall’s painting, the meditative figure is not ignoring the events of his time and place in order to lose himself in solipsistic, irrelevant flights of fancy. Rather, he is feeding on the eternal truths most needed in this turbulent historical moment. As one of Chagall’s biographers notes, this painting is part of Chagall’s own response “to the omens heralding the destruction of the world that had nourished him.”

Crucially, in the background of the painting an angel—suggesting divine providence—is watching over human affairs even when they seem imponderably dark to human eyes. Chagall’s composition suggests that trust in Providence and an imaginative attention to the Word of God provide the proper perspective from which to view the events of our day. Chagall’s seated figure gestures toward a kind of contemplative politics, to use a phrase that may seem paradoxical.